Andrzej Wajda, who died this week at age 90, was Poland’s greatest filmmaker, as well as a union activist, a supporter of dissidents and for a time a senator, but he was something more.

Born in a country that, several times obliterated, cast its poets as interpreters of national identity, Mr. Wajda was a people’s artist in a way unanticipated by the Communist regime that trained and ambivalently supported him.

“There is nothing of the successful cosmopolitan filmmaker about Wajda,” the Polish film critic Boleslaw Michalek wrote. Adapting the work of Poland’s most celebrated writers, Mr. Wajda saw himself as the heir to the Polish romantic art of the 19th century — although there was nothing 19th century about his confrontational approach.

The impact of the tumultuous Wajda style can be seen on the films of younger Polish directors, like Andrzej Zulawski and Agnieszka Holland, as well as on the recent Hungarian film “Son of Saul.” Martin Scorsese has also cited Mr. Wajda as an influence. But no filmmaker, not even John Ford, has ever been more steeped in his own nation’s history.

A teenager during World War II, Mr. Wajda inaugurated his career with five consecutive World War II films, treating such sensitive subjects as the Home Army’s ill-fated Warsaw uprising against the Nazis and the doomed struggle of the Warsaw Ghetto. He thereafter consistently dramatized critical junctures in 20th-century Polish history, making movies that aspired to be political events. Some were films whose onscreen turbulence more than equaled their stormy receptions, like “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958), dramatizing the conflict between the Home Army and the Communists; “Man of Marble” (1977), likely the first Soviet bloc movie to address head-on the failures and hypocrisies of a ruling Communist Party; and “Katyn” (2007), addressing a World War II massacre committed by the Soviet secret police and blamed on the Germans.

Other movies personalized the political. “Without Anesthesia” (1979) is the story of a disintegrating marriage that, in presenting the pressures of conformity, the practice of bureaucratic backstabbing and the experience of a vague but potent sense of disapproval wafting down from the authorities, subtly analyzes an entire social order.

I interviewed Mr. Wajda several times in the early 1980s, both during the heady Solidarity period and after the dismal establishment of martial law. He was as avuncular and courtly as his movies were hectic and bruising, and more than a bit sardonic. One interview took place at the Watergate office complex in Washington. “Who else will be recording this?” he asked.

A prolific director of theater as well as movies, Mr. Wajda could be uneven, but his triumphs were spectacular. “Ashes and Diamonds,” casting Zbigniew Cybulski — a young actor with the look and rebellious charisma of James Dean — as a doomed partisan of the anti-Communist Home Army, was among the greatest of all youth films, a game changer not only for Polish cinema but, once the film was exported, also for national film industries throughout Eastern Europe.

A prismatic investigation of the rise and fall of a postwar model worker, densely interweaving fact and fiction, “Man of Marble” was the Polish equivalent of “Citizen Kane.” Together with its post-Solidarity sequel “Man of Iron” (1981), a movie forged in a white heat, it provided a sweeping panorama of postwar Polish history. If “Man of Iron” is a lesser film, it was because, as Mr. Wajda told me, “we felt the reality was stronger than the possibility of artistic expression.”

“Danton” (1983), arguably Mr. Wajda’s most artistic film, made in France while Poland was under martial law, afforded Gérard Depardieu a career performance as the revolutionary hero Georges Danton. His presence gave this gripping revolutionary thriller a subversive subtext: Danton and his followers are played by French actors, while the villainous Robespierre and his allies are played by Poles.

“Ashes and Diamonds,” “Man of Marble” and “Danton” are all great movies, and Mr. Wajda made a half-dozen others that are first-rate. For me, his masterpiece is “Kanal,” made when he was 30. Addressing the taboo subject of the Warsaw Uprising, it has a visceral, Wellesian brio, and catapulted the new Polish film industry onto the world stage in 1957, sharing a jury prize at Cannes with Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.”

Not everyone loved it. Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called the movie “as dismal, dark and depressing a drama of events in World War II as this reviewer has yet witnessed.” True enough: “Kanal” is exalted and unflinching in depicting the struggle to remain human — in hell. The doomed youthful protagonists must make their way through Warsaw’s labyrinthine sewer, which is a literal translation of the title and an existential statement. Their last hours are spent in a world of excrement.

“Kanal” caused the first contretemps of Mr. Wajda’s career. “The Silver Palm did not protect my film from the Polish critics and audience,” he would recall. “The reaction of the latter was not surprising, as the viewers were mostly the uprising participants or their families, who had lost their loved ones in Warsaw. This film could not satisfy them. They had licked their wounds, mourned their dead, and now they wanted to see their moral and spiritual victory and not death in the sewers.”

At his greatest, Mr. Wajda made movies that had to be seen. His subject may have been 20th-century Poland — but that is to say, the 20th century itself.

Correction:Oct. 14, 2016

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Thursday with an appraisal of Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film director who died on Sunday, misidentified the subject of his film “Katyn.” It is about a massacre by Soviet forces during World War II, not about the Warsaw Uprising. (That is the subject of his film “Kanal.”) And the appraisal misidentified the Soviet organization that carried out the massacre. It was the N.K.V.D. — the secret police — not the Red Army.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Observing Modern Poland Without Blinking. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe